Something surprising has been
found to be happening in the Sahel.
Recent studies on long-term trends
in agriculture and environment in
Niger’s densely populated Maradi
and Zinder Regions show that
local farmers have greened some
five million hectares, simply by
protecting and managing the natural
regeneration of trees and bushes on
their land — producing the largest
scale environmental transformation
in the Sahel, possibly in Africa.
This process began around 1985,
but — although some researchers
had noticed that farmers in some
villages had increased the number of
trees, no one had come to grips with
the scale of the re-greening until
2006. Then the use of high resolution
satellite images, combined with
field visits, allowed researchers to
work out what was happening.

Over the last two decades, farmers
in Niger have grown 200 million
new trees on their cultivated fields. Where farmers had only 2 or 3
trees per hectare 20 years ago, they
now have 40, 60 or even over 100.
Remarkably, they did not plant them,
but protected and managed trees
and bushes which regenerated spontaneously
from underground root
systems or from seeds remaining
in the topsoil. They thus achieved almost 20 times more than all tree
planting projects in Niger over the
same period combined; though
these planted about 65 million trees,
an average of only about 20 per cent
survived. The farmers, moreover,
did this at a very low cost, since
protecting and managing natural
regeneration does not require establishing tree nurseries or transporting
seedlings to planting sites.

What triggered this re-greening?
The Sahelian droughts and environmental
crisis of the 1970s and 1980s
put many farmers with their backs
against the wall. They had to fight
land degradation or migrate. A nongovernmental organisation catalysed
the process by offering farmers
food aid during two drought years
in the mid-1980s in exchange for
protecting natural regeneration, and
farmers quickly realised the bene-
fits of re-greening. A survey of about
400 farmers showed that:

Trees reduce wind speed, and
thus young crops are no longer
destroyed by windblown sand;
as a result, farmers now only
need to plant crops once, instead
of having to try three or four
times, as they did 20 years ago;

Some tree species produce fodder,
allowing farmers to increase
the number of their livestock;

Instead of being burned as
fuel, like 20 years ago, all
dung is used on the cultivated
fields, helping to maintain
and improve soil fertility;

Farmers are aware that some
species, notably Faidherbia albida,
improve soil fertility by fixing
nitrogen from the air (depending
on density and age, they can fix 80
to 90 kilogrammes per hectare);

Women now only have to spend
0.5 hours a day collecting
firewood compared to 2.5
hours 20 years ago;

Trees contribute to food security even if crops fail, for they
produce edible leaves and fruit;

During drought years, poor
farmers literally can survive
by pruning trees and selling
the wood to buy food;

Conflicts between herders and
farmers have decreased by about
80 per cent as the land has been
re-greened: since the resource pie
has grown, there is more to share.

A report published by the International
Food Policy Research
Institute estimates that new agroforestry
systems on the re-greened five
million hectares produces an extra 500,000 tons of cereals a year, feeding
an additional 2.5 million people. The
trees, moreover, are capital assets,
which help increase aggregate agricultural
production and thus help
reduce rural poverty. The annual
production value of the new trees is
at least around 200 million euros,
which all goes to the farmers, in the
form of produce, if not cash.

This process of re-greening by
farmers is not confined to parts
of Niger. Many new agroforestry
systems, big and small, can be found
in the Sahel. Farmers in Mali’s
Seno Plains — between the Plateau
Dogon and the Burkina Faso border
— for example, have protected and
managed trees on 450,000 hectares
of their land. About 90 per cent of the
trees are less than 20 years old. Similarly
farmers in Senegal’s Kaffrine
region, who visited the re-greening in
Niger, began to protect and manage
natural regeneration on their return.
Their re-greening covers about
30,000 hectares and it is spreading
like wildfire.

The African Re-greening Initiative
(ARI) which aims to expand
the scale of such successes, currently
operates in Burkina Faso, Mali
and Niger and is now planning to
expand to other African countries.
Its strategy includes organizing
farmer-to-farmer study visits, developing
national policy dialogues
around agricultural policies and
forestry legislation, and mobilizing
the attention of national and international
media to re-greening.

Developing agroforestry increases
aggregate production and creates
more drought-resilient farming
systems. It is the only major low cost
option for intensifying agriculture
open to small-scale farmers in Africa
with limited financial and resource
capital. Experience shows that they
will invest in trees on their land if
they perceive that they own them.
For, as farmers in Tigray, Ethiopia,
say: “trees are our backbone”.